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FOI: How a council with a bad record on FOI stands to benefit from an FOI request

What’s the best way to get an authority to take the Freedom of Information Act more seriously? Report them to the Information Commissioner? Shout about them in the newspaper?

How about showing them how the Act can uncover information in their favour too?

Admittedly, that wasn’t the aim Liverpool Post and Echo city editor David Bartlett will have set out with when he put an FOI request into the Department for Transport asking about government grants given to projects in and around Southampton docks over the years.

But the effect was still the same – and hopefully a bit of a kick for Liverpool City Council, an authority with a patchy record when it comes to dealing with FOI requests.

Liverpool City Council and Southampton have been at loggerheads in recent months over a cruise terminal which has been built on the banks of the Mersey right in the heart of Liverpool’s historic waterfront. When public funding was secured for the project, it was only ever intended to be used as a stopping point for cruise ships, not for cruises to begin or end journeys.

Understandably, Liverpool spied an opportunity to get more visitors in and requested permission to change the use of the cruise terminal so that cruises could start and end there. Currently, a cruise which wishes to begin on the Mersey has to do so in rusty old docks down the road which, to be frank, don’t exactly set you up for a happy holiday.

Southampton, in turn, objected, arguing it was unfair to use public money to create a rival port where cruises could begin and end. I believe Port of Tyne has also objected.

This case should prove to authorities that FOI is a two-way street – sometimes you have to give out information you’d rather not, but there’s plenty of scope to get the answers you want from elsewhere too.

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One comment

Wishful thinking, I fear. Liverpool continues to delay, mislead and filibuster on FOI requests. They’re actually pretty quick if the request isn’t contentious, but anything which asks about the LDL contract is treated disgracefully – not just a slow response, but frequently one which ‘misunderstands’ what is being asked for, so that only the most tenacious questioners ever receive an answer.

Many requests are answered with ‘information not held’, when, legally, the information must be held by the Council – such as the many requests asking about LDL’s accounts (the council is a shareholder) or LDL’s work for third parties (the Council is supposed to have a share in this revenue, but it all goes direct to BT and isn’t even reported in LDL’s accounts).

Liverpool now has a policy of deleting ALL emails automatically after 90 days, unless the user p[hysically saves them to a separate location. This is supposedly to save disc space (yeah, right).

What I don’t understand is why Liverpool councillors don’t get stuck in and earn their keep. The sums of money involved are huge – somewhere between £70 million and £110 million pa going to BT (quite a range there, eh?) and unknown millions bypassing LDL’s books altogether and being invoiced directly by BT. Huge cuts to frontline services going on in Liverpool, and it all might be unnecessary.